


Paper Birds

by DetectiveRoboRyan



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestors, Angst, Based on a song, Canon Compliant, Fluff, Liberal Headcanon Insertion, Multi, Mute Handmaid, almost poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-19
Packaged: 2018-02-17 23:33:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2327198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveRoboRyan/pseuds/DetectiveRoboRyan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Signless's antithesis is the last person one would expect the Dolorosa to get along with. But this is Team Signless, and evidently, they're fond of doing the impossible, or at least the unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Birds

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this while listening to a song called Paper Birds, and the image I got was the Handmaid making little paper cranes and making them fly with her powers, but when I actually sat down to write the thing (which I've been meaning to do for awhile), paper birds never actually happened. But, nonetheless, the song is good to listen to while reading this. At the very least, it'll enhance the experience and make you sob as much as I did while writing it.

You’re exactly her age and there’s a grub in your arms, and she’s telling you with her hand and her eyes to run, so you do.

Your son is two sweeps old and laughs like everything in the world is right. He points to the near-invisible girl perched in the trees like a bird and says he knows her. You catch a glimpse of silky green fabric before she vanishes.  
  
He’s five sweeps old and he’s made friends with a runaway slave and a wild orphan who clutch each other’s hands like their survival depends on it, and you catch her eye as she’s standing behind them. She gives you an imperceptible nod before vanishing, and you relent to the words of truth and righteousness streaming from your son’s mouth before he can scare the other two away.  
  
The children are all of seven and still sleep cuddled up in a pile together like wigglers when you see her outside your cave collapsed in the full heat of the midday sun, with her dress in tatters and her skin a bruised, bloody mess. You pull her into your cave to treat her and she does not resist, and you wonder as she lies on the floor of the cave how all those cracks in her horns got there when she can’t be any more than eight sweeps old, only a bit older than your son. You can’t ask her about it when nightfall comes because she’s gone and your son wonders why there’s a blanket lying in the middle of the floor, still warm from the heat of her blood.  
  
He is ten sweeps old and you have never been so proud.  
  
He is fourteen sweeps old and you don’t know how it could all go so wrong.  
  
Life goes on, somehow, but you’re not sure you can call it a life anymore.  
  
You are twenty-three when you stand before the Orphaner, and he would have been fifteen. You can feel his pathetic pity when he looks at you, and it only angers you. It’s when he’s angry and frustrated about his ridiculous first pitch, a gambling pirate named Mindfang, and taking it out on the servants, that you storm up to him and pap him squarely on the cheek, because if no one else can be pale for this ridiculous man, then it seems you’ll have to be.  
  
By the time you face the Orphaner’s infamous Kismet as the newest addition to her collection of slaves, you think he would have been nineteen. Your memory is not what it used to be, but you aren’t stupid. You know what the symbol on your neck means.  
  
It has been eternity since she appeared to you, and she does not speak, no matter how much you hiss and growl and shout at her to say something, anything, to answer for the harm she has brought your son. You seethe with rage and you can’t believe you ever decided to help her, that day several sweeps ago. You scoff outwardly at the tears streaming down her face before shouting hoarsely at her to leave you be, but when she does, you cannot help but feel a bit guilty.  
  
The following night is the night you die. You are thirty-five sweeps and your hair is streaked with the pale, grayish hue of jade that comes when trolls age, and there are lines etched into your face. You finally look the way you felt all those sweeps ago when your son was a grub that ate everything in sight and never seemed to sleep for more than an hour at a time. It amuses you that you were barely a child yourself then, and that is the thought you die with when your neck meets the cold water below at a speed quick enough to kill you on impact. It is quick, and it is painless.  
  
When you wake once more, you feel young again, the way you did when your son’s words felt to you as if they could move mountains and shape thousands of bitter, angry trolls into a society filled with hope. And then your son stands in front of you, whole and unharmed and smiling, and you feel more alive in death than you ever did in life.  
  
The others join you in time. They are adults now, older than you were when you first ran from your duties, but to you they are all still your children, and when they nap in a pile like they did when they were young, dozing in the moonlight as you knit or mend or read, it feels like nothing has changed.  
  
More come, even those you considered enemies in life. You witnessed your son pacify such a diverse group into a semblance of peace that you never thought you would share with the likes of the Grand Highblood and even Mindfang, though your relationship with her remains strained, to say the very least.  
  
Nonetheless, soon the population of your afterlife habitat adds up to ten, ten very different trolls all somehow being civil to one another-- though not many admitted aloud that they felt a sensation of peace, but the fact that none refused to leave your son’s bubble for their own certainly said something.   
You don’t expect to see her again, not here.  
  
Her bubble is some distance from your son’s, and getting there took a bit of doing, but you get there anyway, albeit by accident. She sits on the bare rock with her thin shoes cast aside and a pair of white wands set next to them, and her neck cranes upwards to look at the stars twinkling above and watch the green moon explode into trillions of little pieces, over and over again. Her face betrays no emotion. She is simply apathetic.  
  
When she sees you, her mask cracks, then shatters altogether, with tears running out of her eyes and down her face. She’s staring up at you with a look on her face that can only be described as broken, and she looks so tiny, so fragile, so pathetically _young_ , that your immediate reaction is to drop to your knees in front of her and pull her into an embrace.  
  
She clings to you like you’re a tree branch and it’s a long, long fall to the ground below and lets out a wail of agony so intense it hurts your ears and your heart to listen to, centuries of pain and suffering and heartbreak and anger and frustration all shoved into a container too small to stew for millennia, turning into something indescribable. There really isn’t anything you can do but hold her as she sobs into your robes.  
  
You’re almost surprised to learn you don’t mind.  
  
When her tears finally run themselves out, she doesn’t pull away and neither do you. You’re holding her like you held your son when he had bad dreams, and that’s when you realize that she’s just a child after all, a child introduced to pain, pain no troll should ever be made to feel, far too young to know anything else.  
  
Perhaps it was some sort of _thing_ in you that stirred awake when you first picked up your son, but you couldn’t stand to see children in pain. You made a decision then that you were bringing her back to your son’s bubble, and the others would just have to deal with it.  
  
It takes some convincing, but you eventually get her to come along with you. During that time, you learn that she can’t speak, read, or write, spends all the time she could looking at the sky, and that her old masters had lived on the green moon, which was why she continually makes it explode in the sky of her barren bubble.  
  
Miraculously, it works out fine. Her addition to the family takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it, because you see her smiling and you hear her laughing, probably for the first time in her life.  
  
You call her Damara, and she lets you.  
  
And for the first time since before your son’s death, you really do feel complete.


End file.
